Friday, June 19, 2015

The United Maps of Lego

The United States of Lego is a map of the U.S. created from the world's favorite colored building bricks. The map includes 50 Lego dioramas, each depicting life in one of the U.S. states.

Select a state on the map and you can view the Lego diorama for the state. For example, Washington has lots of coffee shops, Texas has a cowboy and Hawaii has surfers.

If you can turn Lego into a map then why not turn Street View into Lego. Brick Street View does just that, re-imagining Google Maps and Google Street View as they might appear in Legoland,

Type your address into this Legoized Google Map and then drop the Lego
Pegman onto your street and you can actually view your house as it might look if
it was built with little plastic bricks.

Brick Street View is the work of Einar Öberg, the creator of the awesome Urban Jungle Street View,
which allows you to see your street transformed into a jungle. Brick
Street View makes use of the same undocumented depth data stored in
Street View. Both apps use that data to create a depth map
which can be used to plot geometry and sprites in the 3d space of the
Street View panorama.

This Lego Style map is made out of colored plastic brick textures, creating a Lego map of the world. When panning around on
the map notice how the perspective on the 3d buildings changes, depending on your point of view.

If you want to join in with this new trend of creating Lego themed maps then you should have a look at Google's Build with Chrome. Select a location on this Google Map and you can add your own Lego building (or other design) to the map.

Build with Chrome lets you design and build your own creation with Lego bricks and then place it on map of the world. If you want to explore the creations already added to the map just
click on the 'Explore All Builds' link on the home page and you will be
taken to a Google Map, where you can browse all the Lego buildings that
have been created around the world.